- Testdisk is powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.

- PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from hard disks, CD-ROMs, and lost pictures (thus the Photo Recovery name) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the file system and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media's file system has been severely damaged or reformatted.

Just to clarify: Testdisk tries to recover partitions that have been deleted or something, and photorec tries to recover files that have been deleted or something.
Dingo - did you look in the package? It probably has both._________________If you have or know of a good gtkdialog application, please post a link here

Thankyou very much for this .pet, I'd been searching everywhere for this utility. The XP version helped me recover my xp mbr/partition table and the partition table of one of my USB hard drives, I will now hopefully recover my second hard drive with Linux Mint on it. Due to fat finger syndrome I selected write to mbr instead of the partition

I'd previously installed Vista on the second drive and uninstalled, formatted, and let Linux Mint do all the partitioning. On boot up I had no operating system found - so, after booting into Macpup and a bit of googling (not much fun on your own ), I came across this site http://tinyempire.com/notes/ntldrismissing.htm and downloaded fixntldriso.zip (floppy & USB versions available), unzipped and burnt the ISO. Rebooted and using fixntldr's first option - XP back again . Followed the instructions to copy boot.ini, ntldr & ntdetect.com from the CD to C:/, great I thought - rebooted - no operating system found .

So I booted from the fixntldr CD again, booted great. I decided it must be a mbr problem, that's when I came across Testdisk for Windows & other OS's at
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download XP working 'perfectly' (wrong word, I know) again. I used it to replace the mbr with a backup I didn't know was there and then fix the partition tables. Testdisk has far more capabilities than I've mentioned, unfortunately I don't understand alot of them! (yet)

I tried recovery console, fixmbr various recovery disks and other suggestions to no avail. I also ran chkdsk on C:/ and the USB hard drive which corrected a few others.

I'm now going to try the Puppy Linux version. At the site above the latest release is 6.10, which I've downloaded, thinking I could update the .pet I've installed. Having looked in the .tar.bz file I realise I have a way to go before I could do that! Is it possible to just unzip it and execute it?

Update: Testdisk for Linuxdidn't achieve the repair that I'd hoped. My second hard drive is still inaccessable from Windows file system - not showing up in FreeCommander. It is showing in the bios (and at bootup), it's even showing in device manager. The drive shows ok in Linux (sdb1 - ext3 & sdb5 - swap) - the swap is used by Muppy (which I'm trying right now)

In Testdisk it showed at location 0 ext3 and at location 0 NTFS (When searching with vista allowed) The two 0's are not a typo. I tried fsck and that said device busy while trying to open /dev/sdb Filesystem mounted or opened exclusively by another program.

I have tried several methods to recover the mbr, Ubuntu LiveCD, #sudo ms-sys -m /dev/sdb, reported that it had done it but no joy - various utilities on hiren's bootdisk.

At the moment Puppy can have a 60gb swapfile! - roll on the new computer..

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